A Cashier At The Whole Foods I Just Went To Says No One Uses Apple Pay

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Whole Foods employee

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

One of the most high-profile adopters of Apple's new payment service Apple Pay is Whole Foods.

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A couple of weeks after Apple Pay launched, payments expert Mike Dudas estimated that Apple Pay already accounted for 1% of all Whole Foods transactions - a startling amount given that Apple Pay is only available on a minority of iPhones, that Apple Pay is new, and that Apple Pay arguably doesn't offer any real advantages over a credit card.

This apparent success triggered a burst of enthusiasm about Apple Pay.

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Well, I shopped at a Whole Foods today for the first time in a while.

While I was paying (with a credit card), I asked the cashier how many people used Apple Pay.

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"Apple Pay?" she asked. "What's that?"

I was going to remind her, but then she remembered.

"Oh, is that the thing where you pay with your phone? No, no one uses that. Oh, I might have seen one kid once do that, but no one else does."

Had the cashier been trained to use Apple Pay?

"No," she said. "How do you do it?"

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I said you needed an iPhone 6 and an authenticated credit card, etc.

"Ah," she said. "Well, I only have an iPhone 4."

This morning on Twitter, someone said that cashiers at the Whole Foods in Palo Alto, California, say that "75%" of people there use Apple Pay. If that number is exaggerated by a whole order of magnitude, it's still impressive.

But at the Whole Foods in Hyannis, Massachusetts - which is not a total digital backwater - it doesn't seem as though Apple Pay is taking the world by storm.